by Gore Vidal
Onstage a slender middle-aged man was doing a soft-shoe number. Simultaneously, he was singing, in the character of Hector, the defeated Trojan hero. The actor had much the same charm and style as Fred Astaire and came, no doubt, from the same school of vaudeville. He was in pensive mood as he contemplated the perils that Ulysses and the Boys would face on their way home.
HECTOR
“Some can be bought for money
And some there are that glory can buy
Some yield their purity
In search of security
And some drown their dreams in a bottle of rye.
“Some go for empty knowledge
And some think sex will set their body free
The man of the hour
Will settle for power
Yes, every soul alive has his fee.
“Except for noble people
Lovely people
Wonderful people
Marvelous people
Exceptional people
Like you
And like
Me.”
There was applause as Hector strutted offstage.
“Jack Whiting,” said Aeneas. “He’s …” But Peter could hear nothing more through the applause.
A thin bubbly lady scientist was relentlessly cheery as she predicted last earthly things to a triumphant chorus of
“Oh, we’re doomed
Doomed, doomed
Oh, we’re doomed
Doomed, doomed
Oh, we’re doomed to disappear without a trace!”
Later, Mother Hare sang the devil’s song, with feeling.
“Good is a word that fools believe
And evil’s a word that the wise achieve
Fools who are good fools try to deny
That evil exists—they pass it by.
“But life without evil is empty and strange
Without evil how can the good ever change?
Without change how can any man ever grow?
Ask Ulysses. He’s clever. He’ll tell you it’s so.”
Peter rather wished that Touche had had the nerve to show just how well evil could flourish in America’s atomic world, but then if he had been so bold, he would not even have got to the stage of the Phoenix Theatre.
At the final curtain, the vaguely familiar tune from the first act was reprised, and Peter realized that Touche had played it for him when they first met, years earlier, in the Chelsea Hotel. It was a love-is-all-that-we-have duet between Ulysses and Penelope, united at last.
“It’s the coming home together
When your work is through …”
Now the entire cast was onstage as Penelope and Ulysses sang.
“It’s to love the you that’s me
And the me that’s you.”
The stage was bathed in a shimmering gold light in honor of that golden apple, so idly given to love, as all the players sang:
“It’s the going home together
All life through!”
When the music stopped, the audience was still hoping for more. But the curtain fell. Cheering. Stamping. Whistling. Actors took their curtain calls. Aeneas hurried up the empty aisle; only the daily newspaper reviewers had left. By the time Aeneas got them to the lobby, Diana had blown her nose loudly and Peter had dried his eyes with the back of his hand.
“What is it that works?” Peter asked Aeneas in the brightness of the lobby; behind them the audience, still at their seats, continued to applaud.
“The war is over,” said Aeneas. “That’s what works.” He put away flashlight and notebook; dried his glasses.
“Only it’s not. The Russians are still coming. We all know that.”
“The war,” Aeneas growled, “is over on the stage of the Phoenix Theatre as of March eleventh, 1954. That’s why everyone’s cheering in there. That’s what everyone wants. That’s what we thought we had when World War Two ended. We were all ready to start up our lives again. Then, we got Korea and …”
“But,” said Diana to Peter, “it’s really over now. And we can,” she reprised the song, “go home at last.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.” But Peter could tell that there were all sorts of conflicting emotional crosscurrents at work in the American psyche, and Latouche had certainly tapped into one. Then a smiling man in tuxedo—a producer?—told them, “There’s a small party downstairs. By the johns.”
The small party was gradually joined by much of the cast and Latouche’s numerous friends. Waiters, out-of-work actors, served champagne. The room filled up, everyone talking at once.
Tim Farrell was standing with Gore Vidal at the foot of the stairs. Gore, Peter noticed, with some pain, was still lean while he himself had never been heavier or hungrier. He had already finished off a paper cup of peanuts from the bar despite a warning sound from the watchful Diana beside him. Diet tomorrow.
Peter greeted Tim and Gore. Greetings on such an occasion involved numerous “wonderfuls” on all sides as Latouche’s triumph was duly celebrated, not to mention that of the composer, Jerry Moross, who was also standing at the foot of the stairs, with his wife, Hazel, waiting for Touche. Sooner or later everyone was obliged to wait for Touche, who led a dozen simultaneous lives, making the weather for others.
“Where is Emma?” Peter asked.
“In Washington. Doing her bit for McCarthy.”
“If I knew Tim better,” said Gore, “I’d suggest he divorce her.”
Tim laughed, somewhat weakly. “Well, that’s a bit drastic. Anyway, we’re Catholic.”
Peter wanted to know what had brought novelist and film director together. “Studio One,” said Gore. “I’m writing plays for TV. To survive. Tim’s one of the regular directors.”
Tim turned to Peter. “Have you ever seen a play on television?”
Peter admitted that he had not. “We have what President Truman calls a ‘television machine’ in the office. To watch McCarthy’s Senate investigation of our Army. Infiltrated, it would seem, with communists.”
Tim looked somewhat glum—loyalty to Emma?
“Actually,” Gore was helpful, “only the Dental Corps appears to be riddled with communists. There’s something about dentistry that makes faith of any kind plausible.”
Tim frowned. “It’s nothing to joke about. Also, remarks like that get heard upstairs.”
“Where’s upstairs?” Peter was intrigued.
“The upstairs of the Columbia Broadcasting System.” Gore seemed more amused than alarmed. “Somewhere, upstairs in the CBS building here in town, they have full-time censors, checking everyone’s loyalty. This means that when somebody’s wanted for a show, his name is submitted upstairs, where they decide if he is or was or might be a communist.”
“Actually, this is all hearsay …” Tim looked very uncomfortable.
Gore shook his head. “Naturally they deny that they vet anyone when, of course, they vet everyone. But what’s truly demented is how someone who’s unacceptable in February is suddenly acceptable in March. The dramatic change often means that he’s gone to Syracuse to see the Butcher.”
“The Butcher?” Peter wished he had taken notes; or was Gore sending him up?
“The Butcher owns a chain of grocery stores and he hates communists, which means that anyone named in Red Channels or even by Walter Winchell or Lee Mortimer in the Hearst papers cannot be hired for television, because if he is, the Butcher will refuse to sell the products of the network’s advertisers. My solution, for what it’s worth,” Gore was plainly having a better time with the inquisition than Timothy X. Farrell, “is to work only for Philco-Goodyear Playhouse on NBC. Their sponsors are Pontiac cars and Goodyear tires, neither on sale in Syracuse grocery stores.”
At that moment, John Latouche descended the stairs. He had been drinking; he had also been weeping. He was surrounded by his usual outriders—friends, admirers, total strangers, all swept into his private force field. He embraced Tim. “Now we can make the film at last!”
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Touche embraced Gore. “The Lope de Vega of television! Every time I switch on, there is another play of yours. De Vega wrote five hundred plays. Or do I mean Calderón?” Latouche settled himself on the bottom stair. Someone brought him a large snifter of brandy: mottled hands shook as he held it to his lips and drank deeply. What would have knocked out Peter or any person of normal constitution refreshed Touche. Although the blue eyes were bloodshot and drying tears glistened on pale round cheeks, he suddenly beamed. “A glass of milk now, as a chaser, and I would be a walking Brandy Alexander.”
Behind him on the staircase, Dawn Powell leaned forward and put her arms about his neck in what he pretended was a stranglehold; his head lolled hideously to one side.
“Dear Touche,” she crooned; and pushed his head to a vertical position. “It’s your own tiny Dawn.”
“They ruined the second act.” He began to sob. Since this was not play-acting, Peter and Diana moved on.
Diana asked Peter if Gore was going to write regularly about the theater for American Idea. He had done one piece already on how, no matter what the situation, the contemporary dramatist’s only solution was love, preferably between man and woman within suburban marriage. “Take my hand, Doris,” he had concluded. “I’m here, Bruce.”
“He says he will if he has the time.” Peter frowned. “Imagine Tim Farrell, the great innovative film director, ends up directing TV plays.”
Peter and Diana joined Tim on a bench, midway between the gentlemen’s and the ladies’ rooms. Tim answered for himself. “There’s no work in Hollywood these days. At least not for old directors. They also think I just do war documentaries. Of course, I’d love to work with Touche, but he’s blacklisted. No Hollywood studio will touch anything he’s connected with.”
Peter refrained from denouncing his cousin, yet again, to her husband. Besides, it was tactless—even brutal—of him to criticize Emma, whose mother had left her entire estate, including Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, to Peter, as tribute to his good sense in a nation notorious in recent years for confusion at every level. Caroline had made only one condition in her will: “Peter Sanford must keep on publishing The American Idea now that he has the money to keep it going until, at least, the end of the century, during which time he will have been a voice arguing for reason in a society that is now susceptible to every sort of manipulation. He once said to me that he hoped to live long enough to see a civilization strike root in our somewhat arid land. I said that I’d hoped to see the same, though I can’t say I ever totally shared his admirable optimism. Now, I will never know what comes next, but Peter Sanford may live to see and—enjoy?—what I would not in the least mind coming back for a brief visit to witness, preferably on some All Saints’ Eve guided tour. But I suspect that the rules of another place require one’s constant presence at the heart of Henry Adams’ beloved Dynamo, where one is simply swirling atomic dust, fueling energy and creating power in order to achieve metamorphosis from what was human to …”
The last will and testament of Caroline Sanford Sanford had ended with an ellipsis. Like life? Open-ended.
In the center of the room, Latouche was embracing the lantern-jawed song and dance man who had played Hector.
“Baby. You were … you were …” At a loss for compliments, Latouche turned to Peter and Diana. “This is Jack Whiting. Mr. and Mrs. Sanford, who are American Idea.”
“Glad there is one,” said Whiting amiably.
“How’s that crazy son of yours doing?” Touche was now in devilish mode.
“The boy? Oh, not too bad. Having a last glorious fling, I suspect. He’s a good lad, all in all.”
Latouche and Whiting were then surrounded by well-wishers. “Imagine,” Aeneas was laughing. “He calls him the boy!”
“Well,” said Peter, “if it’s his son, it’s a boy to him.”
“It’s his stepson. I told you in the theater who it was.”
“Didn’t hear you.”
“Winston Churchill. Jack Whiting married Churchill’s mother, Jenny Jerome. Churchill’s old enough to be Whiting’s father, grandfather. Once, after the war started, Whiting was in a cab when the Prime Minister was on the radio. He asked the driver to pull over to the side of the road. ‘I want to hear my son, if you don’t mind!’ He was nearly taken off to Scotland Yard as a security risk.”
At the bottom of the staircase, Peter waited while Diana said good night to Latouche, who was now holding court in the half-open doorway to the ladies’ room: those ladies who were in distress were obliged to use the gentlemen’s room.
“I must get home,” Aeneas said. “Shouldn’t have stayed out so late.”
Peter was still enjoying the spectacle before him. Sono Osato, the star of On the Town, was dancing with an actor whose face Peter had always known but whose name he had never learned. “How is Clay?” Peter had had enough to drink to mention the unmentionable.
Aeneas shrugged. “I thought he might be here tonight. But Elizabeth’s spirited him off to Long Island.”
“He’s Oyster Bay gentry now.”
“No,” said Aeneas, suddenly precise, “she is. He goes along for the ride.”
“There’s money there, too.” Peter could not resist. “A brass ring at the end of that ride.”
“Mostly Republican.”
Peter gave a mock sigh. “I’d hoped he would find another sponsor. Take the heat off poor Blaise.”
“Don’t worry. Clay’s all set for 1960. Support keeps building. Your Fire over Luzon’s gone out.”
“No smoke? No sentimental embers?”
“I’m sure they’ll be fanned again. But he’s long past that now. After all, he’s twice a hero now. You really did him a great service. Forcing him off to war again. That was the real making of President Overbury.”
Peter winced, as Aeneas intended he should. “He’s not got it yet.”
“There’s continued to be, as I keep reminding you, no one else.”
“Do the two of you still think Jack Kennedy will be dead by 1960?”
Aeneas shrugged. “At the moment he’s back in the hospital. Spinal surgery this time. He may not come out. But if he does, will the people vote for someone whose health is so dicey?”
Peter had been impressed by how thorough Clay’s long-range campaign had been. As a superpatriot, he was listened to on the Military Affairs Committee, where he could be counted on to champion every Pentagon procurement request; unfortunately, Kennedy was no different from Clay on the few occasions that he had been well enough to make an appearance in the Senate. In fact, he seemed every bit as reactionary, politically, as Clay; no doubt due to the influence of his bootlegger father. Although there was not much to choose between them politically, Peter found Kennedy marginally more interesting.
“Two American Ideas,” proclaimed Dawn Powell. “You can’t hide from me, try as you might in the pages of that very small magazine.”
She turned to Peter. “You must be Mr. Duncan.”
“Peter Sanford …”
“Oh.” She beamed. “The rich one. I like to encourage the rich. It is the true charity of the poor. We give them something to live for and lots to pay for.” She turned on Aeneas. “Mr. Duncan. Without sounding like the kindly old Mother Hare, based upon Touche’s deep reading of my character over the years, how could you have written such fraudulent nonsense about my old buddy and drinking partner Ernest Hemingway? Yes, I know that like the rest of us you thought he was dead in Africa, where he somehow truly belongs, in deepest jungle, in a crashed plane with Mary the boy-wife in sections beside him as saber-toothed clichés poke about in Mr. Duncan’s girlish prose, but even de mortuis, truth must at some point make its shy appearance. Yes, into the most trivial book-chattering the odd truth or, as Bill Faulkner prefers, verity must fall. I knew even as we were drinking memorial martinis to our dead friend, a self-confessed giant that once walked the earth, our very own earth, too, except when he was at the Ritz Bar or browsing in Torcello’s gardens, a contes
sa knotted loosely about his bull-like neck, and so, unlike us mere pen-persons … Where was I? My train of thought … Oh! That weekend when we thought he was dead, we wept and drank to his lifelong self-reported courage. We drank to those terrible crack-ups from which he always managed to walk away to write the tale while someone else got hurt. And so it came to pass that, by Monday, silly old history had repeated itself. As we nursed our hangovers, Ernest and boy-wife Mary swam out of the jungle in a sea of newspaper ink, all of it favorable, too. Oh! It broke my heart to realize that he was alive, because if ever he muffed anything it was not having left the stage in the heart—the horror—the heart—the horror of deepest Africa! Mistuh Ernest he dead. Only he’s not. He’s alive. And doomed. And you, Peter Duncan …”
“Aeneas,” said Aeneas, like Peter overwhelmed by the verbal cascade at the bottom of the staircase.
“We left Aeneas behind us when the curtain fell tonight. No. Ernest muffed his death. He got all the great to-do and raving praises before the actual fact. Now he will have to face the shrinkage of everything. The result of a lifetime of back-stabbing everyone who had ever done him a good turn. At least he was pure in that. But you, Duncan … Oh, Duncan is in his grave; after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well; treason has done his worst, nothing can touch him further …” Dawn stopped; finished off what was in her glass. “Duncan, you deserve to die. You praised A Farewell to Arms. And so I read it again, tears streaming down my cheeks as I thought of Ernest impaled on a mango tree like a canapé on a toothpick. Even so, through my tears, I realized the book was just as awful as ever. More wooden than Walter Scott. More clumsily written than any other writer we know of in English. In English! What am I saying? Ernest writes pidgin English, the way he thinks real men talk and write, consummate sissy that he is. Oh, how I loved him! Love him still. He loves me, too. Daughter, he squealed in that high cojones-less voice of his, if ever woman could be great writer, you are she or did he say you are her? No matter. Where was I?”
